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How to find out the reason of the slow loading time of our website?

From the past few days my website has more loading time while open the home page URL.I am losing some amount of traffic due to this high loading time problems.How to find out the reason of the slow loading time of our website?

While the automated tools for the speed of a site are "cute" -- most of them are more about trying to sell you CDN space or have you throw more code at the problem than they are actually about making the site faster or evaluating problems.

The best you can usually do for figuring out these types of problems is to first look and see if server load is a problem. On a *nix based server for example you pop open a SSH terminal session and use the "top" program to see how your server is holding up -- do it when things are slow, and see if something is hogging the CPU that shouldn't -- like say, I/O operations. Runaway error logs (which I've been seeing more and more of as people try to run old code on PHP 5.4/newer) can hog the disk so much on every command everything has trouble running!

If it's not server load, or even if it is, you want to look at the size of your pages; particularly the amount of handshakes involved. Let's use that first site in your signature as the example (Is that the site you're referring to?)

Setting aside the design issues (fixed width, undersized fixed fonts) you've got painfully slow loading scripting, tons of scripting I'd never even place on a website in the first place, and almost a megabyte of images... which to be frank (when am I anything but) leaves me asking "FOR WHAT?". At 1.2 megabytes (compressed, 1.8 megabytes uncompressed) in 120 separate files, real world a first-load of that page could run from a best-case scenario of 12 seconds, to a disastrous worst-case of two minutes or more! OF COURSE IT'S SLOW. (took around 20 seconds here).

You kind of have to look at it this way -- you've got 1.2 megabytes in 120 files to deliver 8k of plaintext and maybe two dozen content images... and that's a bit of a "well, there's your problem!" -- If I was making a site with content that simple, I'd be swinging an axe at most all of the images "below the fold" on the page, and most all of the presentational images -- in general, I'd try to cut a simple homepage like that down to 128k or less in maybe two dozen files TOTAL... and that's a realistic goal.

Another place to look is the markup itself -- you've got 53k of markup for 8k of plaintext and two dozen or so content images -- that's easily three to four times the amount of HTML needed for such a simple page. In that HTML you are also hampered by a complete lack of semantics or graceful degradation. On top of the IE conditionals for nothing, endless scripting includes, static scripting in the markup, static style in the markup, overstuffed keywords META and useless description META (that looks like some SEO "expert" took you for a ride) -- it has tables for layout, tables for nothing (which is even worse), endless pointless DIV for nothing and nothing remotely resembling a logical document structure as it looks like the numbered headings were just slapped in there any old way.

... and the CSS isn't much better. A simple site like that there's little reason for it to be wasting more than say... 32k for the ENTIRE site; what the devil does that need 10 separate stylesheets totaling over 147k for?

Basically, from a speed, efficiency, AND accessibility standpoint, most of the design choices and coding methods used to make that site are faulty... and not to sound like a broken record, but a site like that? My advice would be to pitch it in the trash and start over... with semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, and probably backing away from the painfully bad "scripting for nothing" -- since the 13 separate scripts totaling 652k is only further exacerbating the issue.

But again, I say that if you can't bring in your site template -- not counting social plugins or content -- at 12 files or less totaling 72k or less, you're doing it all wrong.

Following on to the file request figure, one chart shows that each request takes longer, and longer, and longer for the server to comply with.

It's not often that I agree with deathshadow's advice of "trash it and start from scratch", however in this case there's no redeeming value to the existing site. But that's what happens when a "developer" uses a CMS and a bunch of plugins and thinks he has created the next "bomb". Except that each plugin adds another CSS file. And another JS file. And a bunch of images. And, and, and. Oh, but they're neat-o! No, they are not. Especially on a landing page that should load instantly.

kpharthik, you are constantly asking questions here about SEO (mostly to get your signature seen... ). The best SEO you can do for your page/site is to bring in the entire page (HTML, CSS, JS, images, social network stuff, jQuery -- everything) in under 200kb. While I have no proof, I truly believe that search engines penalize sites on their load time and page weight. Otherwise why would Google have it's page speed tool I linked to above? "But it's my server's fault!" In this case it isn't. It's 1.3+ MEGAbytes of junk you've crammed into your page. Get rid of 1.1 megabytes and you'll be infinitely better off.

Another SEO comment, again without any proof: You use 1.3MB of bandwidth to display (using deathshadow's figure) 8 kilobytes of textual content. Seriously?? Search engines thrive on textual content. While you may be crawled by the image bots, what really counts is text. When your pageload:text ratio for a landing page is 100+:1.6 Google will spank you. I don't care whether it's "Panda", "Penguin", or whatever, you will be slapped down with that content ratio.

One of my sites was originally built in 2003. It breaks all the "rules". It doesn't validate for the most part, it uses tables for layout, it doesn't have DOCTYPEs on most pages, it's a mish-mash of everything from HTML3.2 to HTML5. Yet it consistently ranks in the top 5 (most of the time #1) in Google for any search term I care about, and many terms I don't care about. I don't do any "SEO" other than having reasonably consistent and semantic page structure (other than the tables), and using <meta> description tags. I'm actually afraid to update it to more modern markup for fear of losing my ranking. Why does it rank so high with all those "mistakes"? The biggest reason is a high textual content. The main JavaScript file is 100 bytes (yes, bytes). The one and only CSS file is <4kb. Most pages have just 2 or 3 images, and at least one of those is loaded from the browser cache after the first page load. The vast majority of links are plain text, even the main navigation. No fancy dropdowns (CSS, jQuery, or otherwise); this is y2k web tech at its best . But it ranks above the fold on page 1 of SERPS with no SEO. You make your own conclusions.

After actually looking at your site, it absolutely reeks of over-SEO. Seriously. You keyword-pack/keyphrase-pack your content (what little of it there is) to the point of non-readability. You are inconsistent with your company name (is it Zinavo Techologies? Web Designing Bangalore? Web Design Company India? Web Development Company Bangalore? Web Design Companies India? or any of another half-dozen keyword-stuffed, over-SEO'd phrases/names?). One thing Google stresses is that text content should read naturally. Yours doesn't -- at all. It's at times almost incomprehensible due to you trying to stuff your keywords and phrases into places they don't belong. You even stuff the terms into the title attributes of your image tags! Dude, if I can see it (the keyword-stuffing) what makes you think you can trick Google into not seeing it? I mean really -- when the title that pops up on the Playboy logo is "Web Development Bangalore" THAT is keyword stuffing and you deserve any punishment Google metes out.

Well written NON-keyword stuffed content of value that people will organically link to. You have that, the rest is window dressing. While clean markup and separation of presentation can help, that's just because it moves all the extra crap out of the markup so if the search engine is ONLY looking at the markup, it'll load faster for them and be easier to parse.

Hence the term "minimalist semantic markup" -- it's why the method I advocate for building a website starts out with the content -- or a reasonable facsimile of future content -- in a flat text editor putting it in a sensible order as if HTML didn't even exist. You then mark it up semantically -- using tags to say what things are, NOT what they look like -- so non-visual UA's (like search engines and screen readers) have something useful to work with. You use semantic markup, then only add DIV and SPAN when absolutely needed during the styling phase, you end up with a very VERY tiny markup as the result.

Content FIRST; Because that's what's important -- people visit websites for the content, NOT the goofy graphics, goofy layout and even goofier scripttardery you hang around it. It's why I often say the best layout is one the visitor DOESN'T notice, as if they notice it instead of the content, you've done something wrong.

The main JavaScript file is 100 bytes (yes, bytes). The one and only CSS file is <4kb. Most pages have just 2 or 3 images, and at least one of those is loaded from the browser cache after the first page load. The vast majority of links are plain text, even the main navigation. No fancy dropdowns (CSS, jQuery, or otherwise); this is y2k web tech at its best . But it ranks above the fold on page 1 of SERPS with no SEO. You make your own conclusions.

Originally Posted by Kevin2

While I have no proof, I truly believe that search engines penalize sites on their load time and page weight.

"content size" would be your plaintext/cdata without markup. An easy way to figure that is to load the page in a browser -- I suggest "real" Opera (12.17) for this as other browsers add extra crap to the copy, select all, copy, and paste into a text editor that will tell you how big it is.

We take the OP's page from their siggy, and it has 8.03k of plaintext, and by my count 28 images that should go in IMG tags. A quick ballpark of that 'ideal size' formula says the markup should be able to be brought in under 23k... so what is it doing with 55k of markup? All the things I outlined in my previous post.

Which to be frank is kind-of scary to see on a website claiming to be a "web design company" -- though sadly entirely what I've come to expect the past few years; and it's like things are getting worse on that front.

For laughs since I'm at an impass on my own projects (writers block) I might take a stab at a rewrite of that page just to show what I (and now Kevin2) means. I'll probably take a number of artistic liberties and axe a good deal of stuff on the page 'below the fold' -- like that massive space wasting banner rotator at the top.

I often find doing my little "rewrites" (which you can find here) helps me get past my own issues with development. Of course I'm all kerflummoxed right now as I just moved hosting to something cheaper... went from an expensive but limited dedicated to a cheap but more capable VPS